FAQs

After you sign up, you need a trading account. That's it! You don't need any prior knowledge about trading. You also may want to have some money to trade with, but you can learn my trading strategies without it.

Yep! I'm expecting many clients to have full time jobs. The stock picks I post and that I teach include preset profit and loss points, so they're very low-maintenance. If you like any given stock pick, just set the trade up after it's posted, and then forget about it.

Also each trade typically lasts about a week (meaning they are swing trade stock picks, not day trades). So even if there is a delay between the time the pick is posted and the time you see it, you still might get just as much benefit from the stock pick as me.

No problem! You can cancel at any time. It's a recurring monthly fee, so just contact me and I'll unsubscribe you for future billings.

When I make trades, they're normally near the open of the market (6:30am Pacific Time). So that's when you can expect me to post new stock picks. Some trades will fall in between those times. There are plenty of days where there are no trades. Also, I did a study that shows it may not matter if you can't follow a stock pick right after it's posted.

Also keep in mind that if you decide to learn my trade strategies to do them by yourself, then you'll be able to do the trades on your own schedule.

Yep! You can see a Sample of My Live Trading Results to see how the stock picks I post reconcile perfectly with my trading account. That webpage has a video that also shows how my account performed over the two-week period immediately preceding the filming of the video.

On typical days, there are 1-3 stock picks that I make. But I only do trades that are signaled by my back-tested trading strategies since I want to ensure I have the odds in my favor. Because of that, sometimes I might go an entire week without making a single trade because no trades set up in a way that matched my strategies. That's how we want it: we want to be very particular about which trades we take because we want to ensure we always trade with a back-tested edge.

I trade stocks and options so the picks I post are for those trades.

I only trade stocks for companies that are pretty large, like $10 billion+. They're the stocks of the S&P 500 and other large companies. I don't trade penny stocks or other small stocks. Typically the stocks I trade have plenty of liquidity and volume.

For options, I only trade options for those same stocks I just mentioned. I like to trade options that have about a week left until expiration.

No problem! A lot of people feel this way. Check out this page to get my input about it.

No matter how much money you have, you can potentially benefit from the education I offer about how to perform my back-tested trade strategies on your own. The tutorials I provide give you knowledge that could last you a lifetime, whether you have cash right now to invest in them or not.

Also, no matter how much money you have, you can always just pick and choose which of my trades to follow. There will be some trades where the stock or options price is quite low, so you can just cherry pick those trades.

If you want to be able to follow every stock pick and options pick I post and trade it exactly the way I do using my position sizing approach, then you would likely need at least $10,000 in your trading account.

You can use whatever trading platform you want, but I like Think or Swim. It's a trading platform offered by TD Ameritrade. I like them because they let you trade stocks and options in the same account with the same funds. This is a key element of reaping the rewards of the compounding potential of the trades I do.

The account and platform are free to set up. At the time I'm writing this, there are no commissions on stock trades for people who live in the USA. But their fees on options trades are not attractive, to be blunt. For me the tradeoff with being able to trade options and stocks in the same account outweighs the cost of the options commissions.

Absolutely. You can use whatever platform you want! If you already have another one, that's totally fine. It might make sense to stick with what you know.

Absolutely! I am at your service. My goal is to give you whatever support you need in order to get major value out of this service. Contact me any time. I try to be blazing fast at answering emails!

Yep! The first thing you need is a trading account. I like Think or Swim by TD Ameritrade. If you go to that website and set up a brokerage account, then you'll be given an option to download the Think or Swim trading platform.

Once you've downloaded it, you can go to my webpage for Help with Think or Swim to learn how to get started.

In addition, check out my webpage for Help with Stock Picks to understand the basics about how to read the stock picks and how to enter and manage trades after you get them.

On top of that, I have an entire set of tutorials dedicated to showing people how to learn my trading strategies. Part of that educational process includes me teaching the fundamentals. I feel like I'm pretty good at helping people who are just getting started.

If you still have questions that are left unanswered after you read those webpages, then you can contact me and I'll help in any way I can!

The catch is that if you make a million bucks with this service, you're going to owe me big: you'll have to buy me front row tickets to a football or baseball game!

Just kidding. The real catch is that it's hard to live through the drawdowns. Not every trade is a winner. That's just not possible. This isn't a cake walk to a million bucks. It's likely going to take major internal fortitude to live through the drawdowns. It's typically not easy, especially since there is risk and uncertainty!

The other catch is that you never know what can happen in the future. Even though I've done extensive quantitative research for many years, it doesn't mean that the future is guaranteed. Any investment you make has risk, and making trades based on my stock picks and trading strategies is certainly no exception. Read my full disclaimer here.

That's certainly what we're trying to do here! These stock picks and options picks I'm posting are trades I'm taking myself. And I plan to make money!

That said, there are no guarantees. There is no way to predict the future with certainty. That's a fact that every trader and investor faces. With that being the case, if I'm going to make trades in the stock market, I sure would want research, data, and facts on my side when I make trades. And that's the purpose of this service: to allow people to take advantage of all the years of quantitative research and back testing I've done.

If you aren't making money with this service, you should contact me right away. We can compare notes. I can look at your trade log. I can see if there is any disconnect between your trades and mine and make sure you're getting the full benefit of the service.

You can use the income from this whatever way you want. I have two points of caution though:

1. Relying on trading as your only source of income is highly risky no matter who you are. Given that this stock picking service is not time-intensive after you get into the groove, there is no need to quit a job over it. Also the account balance will ebb and flow; it's not like every day you see more profit in your account. You can do whatever you want of course, but I think the huge majority of people would find it very tough to rely on trading as a sole source of income.


2. It slows down your potential to compound your account size if you pull money out for income. That said, it's not like you can leave the money in there forever either though. But there is a tradeoff between account growth and withdrawing profits that you have to consider. I like taking a balanced approach: I withdraw about half the profits after the end of each year (after it's been compounding all year) and leave the other half in there to keep up the account growth.

As of now, absolutely not.

One reason is because I only trade stocks for huge companies. When I'm making picks on stocks like Apple and Tesla, the volume that I do and that my members do are like a drop in the bucket compared to the volume that is typically traded for those stocks.

I have some proof on this page that the price doesn't jump right after my alerts.

Years ago, before I had done my own research and created my own trading strategies, I actually joined a stock trade alert service. The problem I found out right away is that the alerts were for penny stocks or micro cap stocks. The problem with this is that they have such low liquidity that when a trade alert went out, subscribers all rushed to jump on the stock and the price would shoot up. It made it so that unless you were incredibly fast, you ended up getting a price that was way worse than what was alerted every single time. That experience was actually a major factor in why I wanted to focus on trading large cap stocks.

Absolutely. About half of the stocks I trade have options available. And I trade these options myself and post them as live picks.

I also have a watch list that shows the options I'm considering each day.

But beyond my own options trading approach, you can certainly trade options in whatever way you want with my picks. The trades I'm doing are ones where, in back tests, the underlying stock showed a tendency to go up in price. So you can use any option approach you want to try to benefit from that.

You would put your entire account size, not just the available cash amount. The idea is that on each trade, I put about 1% of my account at risk (for most trades I alert) where if the stoploss gets hit, my account goes down by 1%. This is all assuming that you're comfortable using the entire account balance for trades of this risk profile. So for example, if your account has $10,000 in it and you have $2,500 of stock positions already, you still would enter $10,000 as the account balance in the position size calculator. That would be how you can see what position size I would take if I had the same account size.

There is a workaround, but it's not as precise or easy. Instead of setting up an OCO order to exit the position, you could set just the stoploss to make sure the downside is protected. You could then set up an "alert" to notify you if/when the stock price hits your specified profit exit. When you get the alert that it hit, then you could go in and close the position manually.

That's a decent workaround. It's more work to manage it though than what OCO orders offer. Also, you might not be able to respond to your "profit target" alert right away, and the price could move (either direction) in the meantime. But if you want to try out the service without changing your trading platforms, that might be a good workaround.

No. My stock picks are for trades that last, on average, a week, so these are longer term trades than day trades almost every time. I keep track of same-day trades either way to make sure they don't become an issue for the pattern day trader criteria.

Definitely not! I practice mindfulness and it has helped me tremendously with gaining the wisdom to withstand the emotional turbulence that can come up with trading. It has also helped me a ton outside of trading with appreciating the bounty that life offers. But you are not required to do it at all. I am extending a helping hand if you want to invite the idea into your life and think I can help, but you can completely ignore everything I say about mindfulness if you want.

Yep, you sure can.